The Battlefield franchise is preparing to return to our gaming machines this fall, without a real single-player campaign, but with a number of supercharged multiplayer modes.
In a few days, E3 2021 will open its virtual doors, and with it, many video games will be announced, unveiled and showcased in a big way. Some of the most notable publishers, however, have decided not to join the party. Electronic Arts is one of them and if it doesn't want to join its "little friends", the American company is not mistaken in its timing. Thus, more or less as a prelude to the video game event, the publisher has just unveiled the latest installment of one of its most famous series. Don't call it Battlefield 6 anymore, the studio DICE is working on Battlefield 2042 and the battles promise to be more bitter, more disputed than ever.
Launched in 2002 with Battlefield 1942, the Battlefield franchise is now one of the most popular when it comes to online first-person action games. Over the years, the franchise has touched on World War I, World War II, Vietnam, the distant future and even tried out games where we control not just one soldier, but an entire squad. Battlefield 2042 transports us a few years into the future. So it's not a question of a particularly distant conflict, but rather a kind of World War III. We are told about a generalized economic crisis, energy supply problems, food shortages and, of course, gigantic riots all over the planet. Beware, however, there will be no question of offering a single-player campaign as the studio DICE is used to: Battlefield 2042 is primarily a multiplayer game.
However, Electronic Arts specifies that several game modes can be played in single player with the support of artificial intelligence to control various bots, but the heart of the game remains of course the large-scale oppositions. Battlefield 2042 looks set to be impressive with a new barrier set by the Swedish studio DICE: we're talking about a maximum of 128 human players simultaneously when playing on PC, PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S. On PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, we will have to reduce the number of players, but we are still talking about 64 players at a time, with significantly reduced maps. Another notable change is that there no longer seems to be a question of character classes as we were used to: DICE has turned to a system of ten "specialists" with weapons and accessories exclusive to each of them: wingsuit, automatic turret, grappling hook, drone ..
Battlefield 2042 should be available on October 22 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. We will logically have the opportunity to learn more very soon and even if Electronic Arts does not join the E3, it has already planned to release a new video of the game on June 13.
